April 2018 - Liz Kent

This evening we welcomed Liz Kent to our club for the first time. She recently achieved deserved praise for having one of her pieces selected for the Turnabout: Women at the Lathe Exhibition in America. The exhibition features twenty six exhibits, a mix of invited and juried pieces. Her bowl is one of eleven juried pieces selected from a total of sixty two which were submitted. There will be three exhibitions from January to the end of October. This and other examples of work can be viewed on her website.

Liz’s demonstration focused on methods she used to achieve the very attractive carved design on her award winning ash bowl, her favourite wood owing to the interesting grain patterns.

Starting with a pre-prepared ash blank Liz turned the base of the bowl using the standard method of truing up the outside and front faces, creating a spigot to fit the C Jaws, and then shaping the underside of the bowl using a series of push and pull cuts with a bowl gouge, finally sanding to 320 grit followed by 50/50 cellulose sanding sealer.

Top Tip 1 - using sanding sealer at this stage prevents any overspill of colour when painting the top surface soaking into the underside.

Remounting to the C Jaws using the spigot, the small faceplate was removed, the front face trued up, the centre marked and then part hollowed out, before finally checking the piece was square across and sanding.

Liz then moved on to creating the design by first mounting a Simon Hope carving jig in the tool rest and then removing the chuck from the lathe and fitting it into the jig where the reference lines for the carving could be marked using a template that Liz had created …

Having marked the lines it was then possible to hand draw the curved lines which were then carved out using a Proxxon mini-grinder …

After cutting the grooves using a tungsten carbide disk the edges on one side where ‘softened’ using a sanding disk and then finally the swarf was removed using a bristle brush attachment. Five points were marked on the circumference and the 5 sets of curved lines marked, cut, sanded, a cleaned up in a similar fashion before lightly scorching, cleaning with a Liberon brush and then thoroughly painting the complete rim with 2 coats of “Artiste” black acrylic paint …

The next step was to create, in this case, the green metallic effect. Using cheap makeup brushes off eBay Liz put a dab of green metallic paint on a brush and wiped most of it off before lightly dusting the whole of the rim in a similar way to an artists dry brush technique. Silver was then added in a similar way. The rim was then sealed with cellulose sanding sealer spray or gently rubbed ordinary fine paste wax in order to prevent dust settling in the grooves when the inner bowl is turned.

The inner bowl was then carefully turned with a bowl gouge and sealed, ensuring the sealer did not extend over into the rim as it would possibly remove some of colour.

The inner bowl was polished with micro-crystalline wax, but ordinary fine paste wax applied with a tooth brush was used for the rim as microcrystalline wax leaves small white marks in the grooves when it dries out. Finally the whole top was polished up using an old T-shirt which was kinder to the surface than using conventional cloths.

Some other examples of similar bowls are shown below …

We all agreed that the finished bowls are stunning and our thanks go to Liz for showing us how to make them, and congratulations again for her well deserved award.